 scientists and policy makers have to be clearer about the consequences of deforestation and the consequences of another epidemic. But similarly, scientists have to think more like businessmen and say, can we come up with solutions for this that people can invest in so as the solution stops the bad thing happening, but does so in a way that generates job and income for people who are prepared to invest in it. And that requires more interactions between ecologists who are thinking, you know, which won't be lumped in with a environmentalist and economists and perhaps also with sort of business people and entrepreneurs to sort of say, how can we develop economic models that are going to create huge incentives for doing sensible things rather than corrupting incentives for doing bad things. Professor Andrew P. Dobson is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Andy was born in London and moved to live in Scotland before starting school. He spent the next 15 years becoming a keen birdwatcher. He commuted daily from a small village on the edge of the Highlands to Glasgow High School. His family moved to Essex in 1970 and he completed school at King Edward VI Grammar School. Clemsford, where he spent a lot of time measuring a museum collection of bird eggs and trying to quantify changes in their shape and size. He went to Imperial College London University as a botanist and emerged as a zoologist in 1976. He then went to Oxford for his PhD on the mortality rates of British birds. During his time as a graduate student, he worked as a sous chef at the Chairwill Boat House Restaurant. This generated a lifetime interest in food and its production. He was then a postdoc back at Imperial with Roy Anderson working on the population dynamics of host-parasite relationships, work which led him to Princeton to work on a combination of all of the above with Bob May. He was hired at the University of Rochester in 1987 and after three years returned to Princeton in 1990. He lives there as a member of the ecology and evolution faculty ever since and his research focuses on the role that infectious disease plays in the dynamics of wild animal and plant populations and how this modifies the structure of food webs. Thinking about how to develop mathematical models for these problems takes him to Serengeti, Yellowstone, Panama, and along the coast of California. He also works on assorted problems in conservation, biology, and models for animal social systems and how these interact with the dynamics of different pathogens. This work is based on the wolf population in Yellowstone but gains insights from the lion studies in the Serengeti and a long-term fascination with primate social systems and he has published and edited several books conservation and biodiversity, population dynamics of disease in natural population, and unsolved problems in ecology. He has been an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute since 2011. Increasing his time there will be spent writing a series of books that provide introductions to the scientific systems he has studied. Serengeti lives, parasite lives, Yellowstone lives or lives. He's part of the SFI Arrow of the Time working group that is examining time scales and immunity. Andy, I hope it's okay I call you that instead of Professor Johnson. Welcome to the show. That was very long introduction but I know I could say probably 12 other pages of things you've been around for a while as I have. So you've seen many parts of the world and you've done amazing works. Just as a quick extra introduction, what brings you here today? Not only your great generosity but I came across the paper that you and Dr. Stewart Pym wrote together and was published in the Guardian Ecology and Economics for Pandemic Prevention. I also had Dr. Pym on the show and we had a wonderful discussion and your your name came up several times and before that and I wanted to do both of you a little bit separate on a podcast because I know there's so much we could deep dive into. The other real reason is because of your food background. I don't know how much you know about me but I'm extremely big in food, global food reform, food systems and so that that is really why I wanted you to to come on the show as well so that we could have a deeper dive in that after we address the you know the pandemic and COVID-19 and some of the things that you brought out in your paper. I also have a book coming out called Menu B, People and Planet Food Saving Solutions talks a lot about biodiversity and things like that and so I think it's a it's really fitting and I'm honored to have you here so again welcome and it's so wonderful that you could take the time out of your busy schedule to to be with us. My pleasure. Go ahead. I was going to say and I should just start up and say that the paper with Stuart was actually a whole consortium of the work on that so some wonderful people from all over the world and we sort of brought that group together because they had the the expertise to dig into the different types of topic that have to be looked at to sort of make that sort of synthesis. Yes that's true and out of that consortium we actually there was a coordinator for that entire publication and and the two that I was absolutely most interested in having were you and Stuart and so it worked out perfectly and I think the other ones maybe are too big rock stars and busy for for our time. It was a fabulous paper and we're going to get into a little bit of what my thoughts and feelings on that were and how you came about and what your inputs were that will dissect that but with your long biography with your your history of active work so I like it I like the thing that's Dr. Pym mentions a lot as well so actionable science so science that you can get out and I see that not only in your biography picture but in your work and how you're you know talks about how you went out with watching birds and looking at the eggs and so you're out in the field a lot you're trying to apply the actions as well. How have all that background all that study and research prepared you during this time of pandemic so you you deal with pandemics you research that you write about that SARS, MERS, HIV on and on has that helped you at all to weather this pandemic time and how has it been for you? Well I think most many people who are scientists there's a long period of gestation you know you start out as a little kid who's interested in natural history and then you do all the business of getting into university and studying it in depth there and then if you're lucky others I've been lucky all along you get to work with people who mentor you in different areas so very early on Roy Anderson who you mentioned started mentoring me in what was then a very early area the mathematics of infectious diseases and why had ecologists not really thought about infectious diseases as important for natural systems they just thought of them as random events that appear and cause catastrophes and then they disappear and Roy and very much also Bob May who worked together to build this monumental body of theory that let us understand that when we look at diseases we need to use a mathematical framework and that they are central to the lives of all living organisms and in from an ecological sense certainly as important if not more important than predation and competition which were the things that had fascinated ecologists right back through Darwin to the earliest people who thought about natural history and I guess the key thing there is you know you only if you're a zebra you only get eaten once by a lion sometimes the presence of the lion will affect where you be so it's the thought of being eaten is with you all the time but if you're a nematode a parasitic nematode or a virus you're living in that species all the time and taking a daily incremental reduction in its energy budget and causing its immune system to work in a different way so most living creatures are dealing with parasites and pathogens the whole time so to me it was like wow ecologists haven't thought about this way before so kid in a candy store there were all sorts of fun projects that can be worked on to show how important a role pathogens play and then ultimately how diverse pathogens are across the whole biosphere you know every living species has about 10 to 20 parasitic and species that live in it or on it so instantly you've got 10 to 20 times as much biodiversity as we thought we have but it's all eating things from the inside out rather than the outside in there's a one-off effect so the curious thing is that that original ecological perspective that these things just appear as a disaster once in a while is very good planning for mentally planning for thinking of things like COVID or HIV or SARS because it doesn't suggest the one-off things it suggests there's a ton of them out there and what are the circumstances that cause them to move from one host species into a new host species and we've been mainly studying humans and the domestic livestock from that perspective and why what's the difference between the ones that do make that jump and take off spectacularly and the ones that make that jump and just never take off at all so it was like we need to have a body of theory that lets you look at that and then as I go back to the scientific thing you spend your whole life as a scientist as a nerd sort of building up this volume of knowledge and then increasing and you see what's happening to the world you think we have to do something about this because we're massively dependent on that world much more than it's dependent upon us and it's got some nasty surprises in that if we mismanage it could cause huge problems with you I had another professor from Oxford on the podcast his name is Tamas David Barrett and he is I think is Jesus College is where he is specifically and he has a he just launched a new program in a book that he's writing it's called Human Beasts and when we had a discussion we talked about you know how he weathered the pandemic and he said you know I just I had a discussion with a zoo designer so it's a world famous guy who designed zoos for different species and animals and he said but we're living in this human zoo I can see you've got a fairly nice human zoo you've traveled the world you you've probably seen numerous human zoos but during this lockdown this pandemic that's given at each one of us a real close in-depth look at our human zoos and what we've created for ourselves for you know whether it's 24-7 lockdown we're here or if we don't have nature close by and you know you can you can hear all the you know the whether it's domestic abuse goes up or fighting or strife or whether it's just fabulous you know first time you're learning how to cook again or you know whatever emerges the question that I asked you was really do you have any tools tips or tricks that maybe helped you weather this pandemic better because you've you you actually consult or you actually write about what can people do what's the science behind it what can they do to avoid or what actionable things can they do when things come like this before and I know you probably maybe didn't need to apply any of those immediately but that gives you in some respects in my vision and you can correct me if I'm wrong a little form of resilience like you're almost like a futurist so you know how to study you can maybe kind of predict where the math models and the science is going and uh does that give you some resilience in your own life just having that knowledge seeing the world in a different light that has maybe helped you even weather this time better I don't know it's I think everybody's wrestled with this time I think I am unbelievably lucky in that you know I booked my kids graduated from college and and I'm not living at home so we don't have to worry about children going out if we've been locked down with kids I think we would have been having I can't imagine how tough that must be for people who are having to do that and do their home home school I think as it is we're going to be teaching for the university online and that's going to be a whole sort of new experience um this sort of thing being a scientist you've always got all this stuff that you kept meaning to finish off and you never had the time for so suddenly having everything shut down it's like oh there's this backlog of stuff I can now get through so it's been great for me that you know contracts on books which I thought I had to keep delaying it's like oh we can speed up and get stuff like this done now so so as a nerd you always have this ability to go back into yourself and then I am it's been delightful for me to uh be in the same place and as a biologist I'm constantly going to different places to look for things and find things it was nice to stay in the same place and just watch the whole spring and summer emerge and change and really concentrate on the sort of small things like the hummingbirds that come and feed on the flowers outside my window the foxes that have got a den at the bottom of the yard and then going the thing that's kept as most sane I think is a dog just having a we got a young puppy to go with our older dog in the fall and just taking the dog out from walk to uh different locations every morning's been spectacularly nice which you see those different areas developing and then there's this uh I live in New Jersey with which everybody in the United Kingdom thinks of as sort of being like Essex it's endless uh oil refineries but but in fact I've had a student who's just finished a PhD that showed that actually 35 percent of New Jersey is given over as nature reserves which is similar to Tanzania and Costa Rica and there's just wonderful places to go wander around and do natural history so it's it's being a biologist always keeps me sane on on one side and then the other thing that always got me a for a blocker time my my father had a a pub in Essex like I'm allowed to be a little bit rude about Essex because I live there but we had quite a healthy population of significant criminals who come in and whenever they got sent down they would always come in and they say yeah I'm back on my yoga routine I'm thinking about yoga or I'm doing this damn thing I'm just getting mentally prepared to be in lockdown for a couple of months a couple of years in those cases and this whole concept of yeah you can actually it's every morning in the basement I'll do my half an hour yoga and position myself to think through the day that way that's beautiful yeah so I've learned from the best in some ways well thank you for sharing that for me and it also gives me gives a nice insight that you're not some some alien from another planet of scientists that's been dropped here to disseminate another report that you to us that that there is you know that natural thing that that kind of leads in as well to this to the paper and some of the things you you you've written there there is this comment that you made in one of your papers that that I want to dissect a little bit and it basically goes like the epidemic of submitted papers has like went up exponentially and and over the years whether it's climate change or or other things these papers are vast and numerous and becoming more and more I find it difficult if us as human beings are confronted with a bear a lion a tiger we like freeze or run or we panic we have this fight or flight instinct in us but then when we're bombarded with this pile or mountain of you know hundred page papers that are telling us about you know climate science or pandemics or biological issues we're like oh another graph another paper we don't even read it or we don't know how to understand and dissect it in your in your paper the one that I mentioned us is much different than that it's one it's open it's been published on on the Guardian as so you don't need to have a have a nature or scientific login to access the paper in that work but it's a lot about preventative measures or things that we could do to put in place and the costs and what we could do and what the long-term costs are the short-term costs the preventative pre-costs that we have and how that is compared to a reactionary if we just wait and do nothing and then a hat comes what the how much more the reactionary costs are and so I I really I really like that in your papers how can you give us some advice on not only dissect the paper a little bit more and kind of tell us your thoughts but how do we get into this dilemma where we are this information overload of scientific paperwork and we're really just ready for streaming Netflix and you know we're we're disseminating totally other information for the lay person how can how can we use that or are these papers not even meant for us and and are they reaching the right people to take actions on them yeah I mean that's a very complex question it is take it from the toe I I think we should say shut up the the the paper we wrote was actually in science and then we got lots of interviews particularly I wonderful chat with the guy from The Guardian and he did a fantabulous job of synthesizing what we say and then putting it in The Guardian and in fact one of the things that Stuart and I and other people do is to go out of your way as a scientist to both write the scientific paper which has got to be in the language of science and it then gets peer reviewed by fellow scientists to appear in the scientific literature and I said this is where we're getting in this pandemic of that but it's similar we put as much effort into writing the press release and contacting journalists so is what the implications of the science can then be discussed in the in the literature much more broadly and in a way that's accessible to a much broader audience and I think that's as important an exercise as writing this other scientific paper particularly if it's a scientific paper that has important implications for public policies and so that was very much a sort of conscious decision to expand out and do that outreach part of it I mean when I was a graduate student and a postdoc I would spend most weekend in the library just reading everything new that would come out and trying to keep up with everything everybody was doing and that back in the 80s when I was doing it was probably the last time you could do that because there's just too much coming out now and certainly this time last year we had no idea what COVID was there are now over 10,000 papers on it in six months which is usually it takes you six months to write a paper put it into review and have it come out if it's on a fast track so to have 10,000 papers on this thing is indigestible now partly for me things like Twitter have been useful because people will pick up on different things and then there'll be a discussion and then you go you know there's enough discussion about what's in this that I might go and read that paper rather than try and find it de novo for myself you know you hope the sort of cream of the crop arrives in the top scientific journals so when you get your weekly edition of science and nature or plus biology online you can go and look for that straight up and sort of find what was there for that but some of it it's a myth that all the most innovative and creative things make it into the top journals quite a lot of it's in there is innovative and creative or has very charismatic authors but you might miss something really good because the people referring it didn't see its implications and it slipped off somewhere else so you've got to have people keeping an eye out for that and there's enough of a community of scientists whose opinions you trust on twitter think hey someone's picked up on this this is really interesting and they plenty have difficulty getting it out but this is actually important and again I guess it's something you said we like to talk about later I actually think that scientists are amongst the most international community of people because you go I go to the whenever I'm allowed back in again into the department on campus it's a very international place we've got people there from all over the world we all go to meetings in different places and see each other and spend time working with scientists in different countries so I think particularly in the sort of conservation area and in the healthcare area scientists is completely international community of people who are working incredibly synergistically with each other much more so than this impression that we're all competing with each other I think COVID has shown that there's a huge amount of synergy and people are having to listen to each other and say you know this is too big for any one of us different people are going to have to focus in on different things and that's actually spectacularly different from earlier epidemics such as HIV that when HIV appeared there was this sort of ugly pissing match between people who want to be the first person to discover what it was because that's where the Nobel Prize was that doesn't seem to be as much of that with COVID as there was with HIV I had the director of innovation and development research and development from MIT media labs on and we talked briefly about what you just talked touched upon as well where this transition to now we're going to partly go back but we're also going to create this big you know type or a different way of doing things online sort of reaching out to the students online in science and lab work or anything like that it's pretty hard to do to a certain degree and it's surprising how many universities I've seen out there that were not already prepared in some respects on that transition but also the the integration of how now does the professor who's at home and then the students how does that still come across how does that function with different computer types and technologies and that does also lead into the question that you mentioned that I have for you it's basically do you consider yourself a global citizen and how would you feel about a future without nations borders limitations separation of humanity because I mean that that also really ties into not only this transition that universities are making so online I've been involved in it from the UN sustainable development solutions network that's done online MOOC courses for years now with the jeffrey professor jeffrey sacks in Colombia and and they have great universities Berkeley Princeton are part of those as well they have online MOOC courses but that is not a unit for me it's also not a unified transition for the entire university it's small pockets and so I'd like to see your insight on that but also what's the future of your work going to look like in that question it's kind of complex multifaceted yeah I agree there are obviously multiple answers deep down I think Dr. Johnson said it first and said it best that the patriotism is the last resort of abandon and they sort of nationalist movements we're seeing at the moment are plainly completely useless in dealing with something like Covid you can't pretend to have a nationalist organization that's going to be used like that so and as I mentioned earlier science is a massively international enterprise and part of the delights of being a scientist to be able to collaborate internationally with people and the last I guess I started with one of my very first job the first semester when I was at Rochester in 1987 I got asked because someone else was sick Roy Anderson was ill and couldn't make the meeting so I got asked to go and teach at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics which is in Trieste in Italy the International Centre was set up by Salim Ali who was the first non-western person to win a Nobel Prize he won the Nobel Prize for field theory and physics and decided he would take that money to set up an international centre for people such as himself who come from a tiny village in Pakistan but were scientists who wanted to work on big hard problems so they set up ICTP to do that to bring in people from the southern nations all over the world to learn physics chemistry initially and then some of my colleagues said well it'd be quite useful these people ecology and epidemiology have now got this deep mathematical background similar to the things that physicists do so it would be good to teach these things because they might also be useful for them when they go back home so since 1986 we've been bringing people there every couple of years to specifically talk about or to learn about the mathematics that lies behind environmental management the mathematics that lies behind epidemics and disease control and that's created a mass international network of young they were young when they started they're all quite mature now scientists with their own younger scientists who all work together on these problems and it was incredibly useful for things like when HIV came along about it meant they had a bunch of people who understood what the dynamics of that were likely to be back in Uganda and East Africa or what it was going to be like in South America and you had a respond in similar ways and talk to each other about what different countries were doing so that was also really healthy that the different continents would then set up meetings within each continent to each other and that was nice because you know the Spanish would always be speaking Spanish with each other that makes it go a bit faster Africa doesn't have a common language so they would go with a different right um but I think you don't need to have a completely lose all national barriers because particularly for many indigenous peoples that that is a thing that massively enriches the world and enriches our understanding of the world so I'd hate to see us lose the Inuit or the Masai or the Hadza so you have to retain some aspect of identity with the region in which your peoples have lived for a long time but that doesn't have to be this egregiously an abhorrent nationalism but it's often you know the white people to have a nationalist like pride in the US when they've only been here for three generations is a poor the so it's massively misplaced and it's replacing a lot of other insecurities that those people you you obviously are living in you you you do see yourself as a global citizen well I spent time in lots of different countries you know I am I grew up in Scotland but but I I feel very much at home when I'm Scotland but I'm growing up in Scotland as a kid with an English accent I was very much strongly let know back in the 60s but I was not local yeah yeah so that 1.5 media innovators magazine is in Glasgow that's the headquarters there and so yeah that that's really interesting I want to move a little bit more towards the food aspect now if that's okay I call myself a global food reformist and coming out with a new book called menu be people on planet food saving solutions and it's more on the lines of Paul Hawkins book the drawdown right and the drawdown review what I'm trying to do is as I'll find the the latest innovations tools tricks tips to do in the in the food system the complex food web system that we have to to draw down our human health problems our environmental problems because in my opinion they're much stronger than that of the oil coal and gas industry the chemical industry or the the automotive industry they're still on the list don't get me wrong but I think that's food is something that we all do each and every single day we're tied to it's a basic resource of keeping our regulator temperature but that we really need to globally reform food that in the whether you look at the industrial revolution or if you look at we've been doing agrarian societies for 10,000 12,000 years there's really only been about six great innovations in that time period so we're still kind of stuck in the dark ages our industrial age on how we produce and and that it's only getting worse we're wasting more food we're wasting more resources and uh august 22nd was earth overshoot day and so your ties to food and your vision on how you see it what are the tools the tips the tricks and how do you see food affecting not only human health but also drawing down our environmental problems and what are your feelings on that well I mean plainly everybody has to have access to food as a human right and we have this problem that we've got to feed everybody and we've got to feed everybody with healthy food and that again there's this how do you define healthy because one of the other problems is to grow enough food we need land and we either get land by converting tropical forests or tropical savannas into fields for soy and cattle or we find more efficient ways of using the land we have to produce a higher volume of high quality food and that's you know the central dilemma that faces conservation biology and is frustrating in many ways because the conservation of biodiversity movement movement is massively um tied to the anti genetically modified food movement and I think that's a big mistake we only have any biodiversity left in southeast Asia and in much of Africa because of the green revolution behaving being able to massively increase the productivity of areas that have already been uh converted for rice in particular having genetically modified rice and breeding rice to be more productive hugely increased the production of the land we already had and stopped the destruction of the remaining land in southeast Asia if we hadn't had the green revolution we would have no forest left in southeast Asia and you'd still need about a quarter of Africa to feed the the the turn of the century population of southeast Asia so we have to see that increasing the efficacy of food production is central to anything we want to do with biological diversity because still the biggest threat to biodiversity is loss of land conversion of land food burning rain forest converting savannas and producing relatively low quality food on that land because there is this sort of deep irony that it's not the most productive soils that give you tropical forest the reason those forests are so diverse is the relatively low quality soil means you have lots of species competing with each other rather than one suker competitor going for the best quality soil so so people tend to look at tropical forests and say if it's abundant as is it must be great for agriculture that's always been pure crap it's like if it's not very diverse and there's good soil that might be good for converting for agriculture we've converted most of the really good land what we need to do is think about restoring land that used to be productive for agriculture but has lost its productivity and is now being misused or just abandoned and as I say looking at viable genetic modifications of crops to make them more productive without necessarily doing the very dodgy things to create a monopoly they're the big ag people trying to they've got to see that feeding the planet should be the motivation to feed lots of people rather than just the pockets of the deeply wealthy people who are part of a big ag which is in its way almost as corrupt as big farmer there's a lot of debate and controversy around GMO that many have taken up and not fully understood the not only the science but just what's really the truth behind it what's really the reality behind it so in an agrarian society in agriculture really for since the beginning we've been doing grafting and splicing and different types of modifications that are not in a laboratory but are still in a science you know farming is a form of a science in some ways. Simply in GMOs you'd never eat a crop. Yeah you'd never eat a crop. It's the unnatural hybrid between the North American species and the Europeans. Exactly. Victorians genetically modified over a century ago. Yeah yeah tons of modifications over century and grafting splicing and many other techniques that actually occur at the farm area not in some lab. A lot of people have this view of GMO as something occurring in a lab and I also believe that it's one tool for the for a multifaceted complex system toolbox that can can really help us but it's a much more complex thing that needs to be to be addressed. Going back to your earlier question like COVID, the wonderful thing about New Jersey is that Jersey was the food basket for New York and much of the eastern seaboard for much of the last century but it's still got fantastic farms so I usually go to the farmers market on Saturday but with COVID I've only been buying food from the farmers market and that's been great because everything is now bought locally. I don't go to the local supermarket against some wrapped in plastic that's come a huge distance anyway and our sort of standard and quality of eating is two to five times what it was pre-COVID because everything's local and fresh and you know get to go and actually talk about as I was in the store this morning that the wife of the farmer was in there chatting to people and there's people from all of the world being employed there and it's a completely different social experience going out to get food done. Yeah it's really nice if you've seen any of the images or the media of grocery stores during the pandemic you know they all show you know all the toilet paper gone all you know all the preserved canned goods gone but in a few of them if you look closely as they walk by the fresh produce area they're always pretty full and that's really what people you know should should should go to and learn you know techniques of preserving and jamming and dehydrating and fermenting and and things so that you know if it can't be eaten fresh immediately and it's not going to make it long enough in your fridge that then you you know you make a juice you make a soup you make something that can be preserved for a long time you put it in your cold storage something that you know so there's such a complex big thing but also some really wonderful things that have emerged during that time and so it's it's great to hear that one of your other papers you mentioned something that ties to the GMOs and so I want to address that now and so it's this this resistance drug resistance pesticide and insecticide resistance and I am absolutely I think GMOs are fine and they they serve a facet in the toolbox but when it's complimentary or needs to be used with a chemical or fertilizer or a pesticide or insecticide to make it work then that's where I drastically change and move away and so you you mentioned that you know in in how this drug resistance pesticides and insecticides are actually tying into the evolution of not only viruses and pandemics and how they're you know those are things some there's there's two other terms that you use when we just look here it's basically the incubation infection periods and and how quickly they emerge and how they evolve over time and and so I don't know if you could maybe address that as well on your thoughts and feelings no I mean part of that goes back to some work I did with Bob May when I was first here at Princeton as a postdoc in the 80s the the national academy was putting together a report on insecticide resistance without Bob to give a talk and he said to me can you could we do something together on this and and so we said it will be interesting to look at the the rate of which resistance to insecticides evolves in different species and so I went went to the library dug out a bunch of things and then you know it's really blatantly obviously but I put it together and take this and it's like you know insecticide resistance never evolved in the birds of prey that were exposed to DDT whereas the insects or mosquitoes or the bacteria it evolves really quickly and then and then Bob said well you know if you write down an equation for evolution that to a rough approximation that the the time at which resistance evolves is one over the log of generation time so the shorter the generation time the faster resistance evolves so it's not surprising that viruses can evolve resistance really really quickly insects can do it quite quickly but the birds of prey just never have enough generations so their eggs are always going to be crushed and that goes to that sort of huge asymmetry that's there with these GMO crops that are designed to be resistant to things so as when you spray them without you kill all the weeds around them and Bob wrote something that that's not widely coded but he said it shows the appalling arrogance of the agricultural industry that it assumes that the food and the land it's grown on should only be for the use of humans we have to recognize that other species use that land and may actually be doing the job of protecting us from the pests of agriculture that we will ever be able to do and so I very much I took those sort of thoughts to half this whole idea that that agriculture is this desert that's just producing food and nothing else should be alive in there is completely antithesis to what New Jersey looks like the moment when you walk around these fields there are hedgerows that Fox is wandering in and out of the it's still producing spectacularly good food but it's not the sort of industrialized much that most people would be better off converting into ethanol and actually eating themselves yeah exactly there's um so I come from six generations of organic farmers and Germany's largest organic farmers and four generations of hydroponics so these areoponic farmers and dealt with food and this long time in the last 10 or so years there's been a lot of movements especially in FAO and awareness around farming for regenerative agriculture agroecology and permaculture and no teal so a lot to do with getting away from monocrops and diversification of crops with permaculture and regenerative ag works mixing different crops and using this some of these no teal methods using an IMO type of fertilizer which is as organic it's called IMO stands for indigenous microorganisms so for the local place where you're at you actually create your own indigenous microorganism what's specific to the type of crops in the area you live in the soil the the waters and that kind of it's almost like a different fermentation type of process the way you create that how that is created locally and just some amazing things are being seen and done in that respect and so I have seen fabulous results and a lot of these local farmer markets whether it's New Jersey and or whether it's in in Germany or whether it's in and you know real remote places of the world that those who have applied that are actually finding that especially in developing countries is turning into a form of a food forest and it's really just a thriving better model that really solves a big problem around our soils and that that is a huge problem not only with pesticides and chemicals but what what is occurring is the FAO said five years ago said we have 50 harvest left until our soils are ruined so now we're four and five years later 45 harvest left but that's a traditional traditional monoculture a big industrial agriculture where they use pesticides chemicals and and those type of fertilizers that to in their process and so if we switch if we change that system and we come up with other ways where we do these on a large scale which is possible or on a very local scale to the small medium size farms and agriculture I believe it is truly a better model not only for the encroachment on tropical diversity and forest and that that we're encroaching on those because of animal agriculture but also on just you know planting soy and palm oil or whatever the the different crop is at the time which is what comes from the Stockholm resilience institute living within the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries within the resources we have for that year and we're already kind of encroaching on on some some outside so I don't I don't know if you have any any more to say about that but that I think it's a crucial message of this bizarre misconception that like the most important resources on the planet are oil and gold and exploration for oil and gold the two of the most damaging things we're doing to the planet and those are two not very useful resources increasingly less and less useful resources whereas as you say the things that we've got a limited time for but essential to our existence are soils and water we're heading as rapidly towards a water crisis as we are towards a soil crisis humans cannot survive without a liter of two liters of water a day and everybody on the planet needs to water away and the only place we realistically get that in a clean controlled fashion is from the world's forest as we diminish the world's forest the water is not stored anywhere and released and cleaned at a slow rate it just runs off and takes the soil with it into the ocean so until we have changed the way we think about climate and land management to consider that the two crucial resources that when much more dependent on the oil and gold and soil and water you know we're in a mess yeah and we we we I see a lot of change and and there are a lot of big organizations that are on the move towards the global food reform the the way it ties into the question I asked you about global citizenry is because during the pandemic food was the only thing that really wasn't locked down as well as those birds and species that can cross cross borders but humans were the ones who were domesticated in the lockdown and kind of confined to certain certain areas and and how do we think on a different global operating system or model of of doing things while still preserving these nationalistic these borders is there a way that we could raise the bar higher and say this is a global standard we're not going to let humanity ever get below but we still have our cultures and our nations but the standard is setting up much higher on on a global level whether that can be addressed or or or solved this time obviously not but it leads into my question the first big burning question WTF that I'm going to ask you is what's the future what the mathematicians always joke the thing about the future is we should never predict what's going on but I would like to think that we use COVID as an experience that tells us we need to be more international the the the people who have done a good job of dealing with COVID the same people who did a really good job of dealing with Ebola and HIV and that's organizations like the WHO the World Health Organization and also the United Nations needs to have stronger powers that it can only achieve by each nation having more sympathy by the with the polyglot way that the United Nations actually has to operate because it has to represent all people but you need that organization to be something that sets an example that offsets itself against this self-serving nationalism that doesn't serve anybody other than the individuals in charge of it so you need that much more open-minded international mindset to be able to deal with things like environmental crises and the next pandemic because looking into the future this isn't the last time this isn't going to happen I mean in that science paper if you look at the frequency with which these things arrive we get two new viruses in humans every year that we haven't seen before and roughly at the same frequency as we have presidential elections in the US or parliamentary elections in Britain you get one that establishes and starts causing a pandemic so you know three or four years time something else is going to come along and thanks to COVID we're in a much worse economic state to be able to deal with it hopefully we've got much deeper scientific understanding of how to deal with these things but the better way to go is to set new systems in place that stop them coming over at the rate of which they're coming over at the present point and those things are the things we mentioned in the paper hugely reduce the rate at which we're chopping down tropical forests because lots of things are coming through that way do something about the wildlife trade because that's entirely focused on producing luxury goods but it's not producing food for poor people it's producing luxury stuff for the fur industry for the strange sort of drug industry it could easily be stopped and it's intrinsically intertwined with human trafficking and arms trafficking so it's a major criminal enterprise that we need to just get a grip on and close down and the other thing that people that we're getting emerging disease from it is intensive agriculture and again rethinking that agriculture model so is it's not so much producing new pathogens as creating the the the resistance that we see in many of the sort of co-iron bacteria things that emerge from intensive agriculture so there's quite a few things there that you mentioned that I'd like to kind of unpack the first one's more just a mean comment I hope that they get the vaccination for the trumpocalypse distributed before november so that the vote goes correct but there's no hope of them having a vaccine to the scale they need by november even and I suspect the people in oxford are ahead of everybody else this one and they've already started the production of what they've got um but you know global production of vaccines for the vaccines we already have is pretty much at the max if we have a whole new pathogen that we've got to vaccinate everybody on the planet with then we've got a double vaccine making and that's going to take two three years to be able to do that even if we have a successful vaccine the other thing is we don't know how long immunity lasts uh we don't I mean there are the reports earlier this week that people in uh I think it was Korea or somewhere in southeast Asia were getting second doses of COVID not showing any symptoms but we don't know if they were transmitting it or not that suggests that if natural immunity is only six months to a year then once we have a vaccine everybody has got to be vaccinated every six months to a year and you know it's hard enough to get all the people to be vaccinated for influenza every year and we have all this sort of vaccine rejection by the the religious loonies in other places so that's going to be a non-trivial enterprise yeah it really is I mean it's not only uh can be seen in other areas I mean when when you get a new iPhone or a new galaxy phone or a new computer I mean we we can't even keep up to date with all the updates that they do every year for security and viruses or for new operating systems let alone read where what button to push or how to update us on that speed because it's just it's it's it's too much and have a vaccine even if we're going to get a vaccine every six months or you know it's that's not the future we want to be in for absolute for sure in the paper but you also you also want a treatment I mean we've been very lucky that the dexasone it seems to be a cheap already available thing that does a fantastic job of reducing inflammation in people with severe COVID and that seems to be the major pathology that we've been able to knock down but we need other forms of treatment that could be much more widely used at an earlier stage of infection because it's a simple question would you take a test vaccine if you didn't know there was a cure for it if the vaccine doesn't work they give you the vaccine and then they're going to expose you to to COVID would you do that if there was no treatment for you if the vaccine doesn't work so you need the treatment almost more than you need the vaccine yeah I agree the in your paper you talk about a lot of preventative and tropical deforestation so again to me and maybe it's just the weird way I think it has to do with globalization because we're talking about different areas where there's a loss of biodiversity and tropical forest but that leaders in the united states leaders in the european union leaders and the you know that are probably not doing that good leading in the in the past few years the bull scenarios the trumps the putans the the wartes the arid ones that that actually the whole world is now relying upon them to not only put the monies in but to protect and conserve those those tropical forests to prevent deforestation to also put plans and measures into place that really affect us all in the transmission and the prevention or the ease of future it's going to come regardless but the ease so that it's not a reactionary measure that we take that we're a little bit better prevail or prepared and have a little bit more resilience and for me that that's the our current civilization operating models that we function on whether it's the un or just individual nations united states or the european union or china are not unified and their prevention methods or how they address this say yeah no who's going to foot the bill who's going to read the science who's going to say no that's exactly what we need to do but on a global level because they're making decisions for us on a global level am i seeing it wrong or am i understanding it right you know well i i i think scientists and policy makers have to be clearer about the consequences of deforestation and the consequences of another academic but similarly scientists have to think more like businessmen and say can we come up with solutions for this that people can invest in so as the solution stops the bad thing happening but does so in a way that generates job and income for people who are prepared to invest in it and that requires more interactions between ecologists who are thinking you know which won't be lumped in with a environmentalist and economists and perhaps also with sort of business people and entrepreneurs to sort of say how can we develop economic models that are going to create huge incentives for doing sensible things rather than corrupting incentives for doing bad things you know it's one of the books i've been reading in lockdown is this wonderful book about the the end of democracy which is never probably not there by neil and i'm gonna get the guy's name wrong he's a king which it'll come to me in a second but he points out that democracy is not designed to make sensible to make creative new solutions you rely on industry and technology to come with new solutions what democracy is designed to do is to have a range of differing opinions so really stupid bad things don't happen you've always got somebody to vote in some ways against innovation and control the rate of which it's happening and it's just that that is corrupted by a handful of people making huge amounts of profits out of topical deforestation oil exploration gold mining being able to pay for the political campaigns of people who come in and instead of respecting democracy abuse it for their own self-interest one of your papers you mentioned Bartlett and and uh i don't know if you mean me now Bartlett and Bartlett either Ronson is the guy who's with democracy because i should say okay okay Ronson yes Ronson and Ronson are you N C I M A okay and and one of your papers you mentioned Bartlett and i don't know if it's a Bartlett a Bartlett speakers an exponential function is that the same Bartlett or is it a different Bartlett the guy who invented stochastic calculus and yeah original work on the population dynamics of measles which is still the disease that gives us the most important insights to how viral diseases work in population and so they're the reason i bring it up because he uh you know did fabulous things but also is very big proponent as the one of the biggest problems our human failures we have is not uh rightly grasping or understanding the exponential function with viruses and pandemics and things um you all too well know how that exponential function works and how quickly things can spread um which is in stark contrast almost to what you just said about democracy and how we need to let um people who don't have a clue slow the process down because that exponential function isn't going to slow down because people who don't have a clue are saying oh no let's let's take it slow so how do we keep up to speed with our exponentially growing world good bad and ugly the viruses the pandemics but also use it in a positive way use the exponential function in a positive way to get back into the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries heal our health and our viruses and more so um the the next question that i'm trying to ask you with this is i believe a lot of this is these issues are tied to the healthy biome of our earth the more deforestation the more encroachment the more um things the more unhealthy that biome is which really affects us and it's one of exponentials so how can we use that function in a positive way to also in preventative measures like your paper speaks about you know i don't know if you're following me but it's to me it's almost like we've got this world that's growing exponentially around us good bad and ugly but we're still kind of stuck in the industrial age we're still stuck in these very bureaucratic or every four years we vote in a new guy who doesn't know anything about helping us get to where we really need to be on some of these decisions or or prevention again it's partly you know exponential functions is one of the reasons that nerds love science because they're gonna particularly things like the structure of forests ecosystem savannahs it is interactions between species each of which have the potential to grow exponentially but because of the way they interact eating each other from the inside or the outside depending on whether you're a parasite or a predator slows down that exponential growth rate but creates a growth rate in another species that's capitalizing on those so trying to understand the mathematics of how all those things interact with each other i i think is the major scientific challenge of this century with moving beyond the the age of physics and chemistry which deal with one or two particles bumping into each other and really doing anything exponential um they're done at a spectacularly heroic scale either the very tiny scale of corks and bosons or the scale of planets and the big bang but their bug are all used to people alive on this planet at the moment they're great for the egos of the physicists working on them but they have very little use for humans whereas the structure of everything in the backyard i can see out there the 40 or 50 different species interacting at orders of magnitude different rates and strength is a much harder mathematical problem yet if that backyard is producing the food for my family we have to understand that mathematical problem quite quickly similarly if it's a forest that's cleansing sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and stopping the planet heating up we need to understand the mathematics of how that forest works and how they keep it going but then being able to convert that into something that the politicians understand and and business people can see as something to invest in to maintain it it again requires a few more steps in communication and similarly it goes across something i've been spending time at a wonderful place in marseille sort of since she presents that there was ecologists and economists interacting with each other but then economists are very interesting to me you said you know we both make similar types of models these non-linear mathematical models and we predict what's happening and it never seems to happen and then when it does it all happens much more quickly than we ever thought it was going to happen and that's the same thing with what we're doing to the planet we can make these predictions of these things are going to happen and we think well when's it going to happen and then when it does it's much faster than we ever thought it was and economies do the same thing because he's saying non-linear interaction whereas the people who want to understand hate that non-linear the thing that gives you an insight into people's inability to grasp exponential growth is half an hour every evening on the tv and the radio there'll be the stock report and they said it was a record day on the stock market it went up 500 and it's like for that 500 the day is completely different than 500 uh 10 years ago it's equivalent to 50 10 years ago because there's things at a different place because it they should all be giving those reports in logarithmic numbers and things like that but none of them would understand it if you gave it in the language that really matters the determines what it's actually doing do you um and i don't want to get too far down another rabbit hole but do you believe that emerging technologies algorithms ai um big data blockchain distributed ledger technology that those are any tools or tricks for us to um kind of help us to deal with einstein's problem theory that we can't use the same thinking to solve our problems but also to give us that digital advantage that exponential advantages maybe even quite get into quantum computing to help us say nope okay here's how we can compute or understand that it's done in a in a way that's a secure did smart contracts distributed ledger technology somehow to to help us better because we're not able to compute or to understand it fast enough to do that to use that as like an extra layer or tool do you think those things could i i think those things are vital to what we have to do particularly for these as i say that but what i see is the biggest problem in science is understanding the mathematics of natural systems and because it's so many different species interacting at different rates in parallel you're gonna have to have massively powerful computational abilities to do that and new algorithms to do it and to me it's wonderful again one of the people that i've met it at um um in my say it's this amazing math and italian mathematician who's written this great 900 page book on new sets of partial differential equations that will allow us to solve all sorts of different problems in computational ways we couldn't have done 10 years ago and certainly your understanding food webs bob main when he first sort of looked at this relationship between species diversity and stability of webs could do as much as he could do with his formidable mind analytically and then he said but i can't go to more than four or five species but 25 30 years later the advances in algebra just analytical skills mean we could get up to about 20 25 species now and that's a more realistic level of abundance but his results still hold we just have a stronger mathematical framework within which to look at it and to me the logical step is in you're always it's fantastic to have that huge computer power but you've got to use it with something where you looked at the result analytically to the level of mathematical ability to understand it before you put it in the computer and just number crunch it with the first numbers that come into your head understand its assumptions in a simple mathematical model of the different bits of the system before you put them together and crunch the numbers because crunching the numbers it's technologically tried straight forward garbage in is garbage out so get it correct before you then massively scale it i i totally agree with you and i do believe it is a good tool but we also need to make sure that the way it's input is that's proper we we've actually been learning about this for many many years back 1972 the book the limits to growth which actually started out as a paper and report Donella Meadows Dennis Meadows your grander Steve Barron's the third club of Rome and the Volkswagen Foundation wrote this fabulous paper which turned into a book with now three or four editions it was based on systems dynamic modeling systems thinking a world model three was the first computer model that they put this data the math and let it ran out multiple scenarios to come to this in some ways helped in many ways we still are kind of not not there i mean in that 1972 now to 2020 so it's nice to hear but we've we've still got a wrapped our mind around around the abilities to use some of those i know you guys use modeling in some of your work as well i think the essential problem there is that system biology system thinking tends to look at how you couple different stages of a process would get and computationally it's often powerful enough to do you know if you think of it as the food web what's going on amongst those like the microbiome you mentioned how do they affect what's happening to the plants and how does what's happening to the plants affect the things that eat the plants and how does that affect the things that eat those and all the parasites in the chain in between we can maybe do two or three layers of that because they're coupled non-linear different rates between those different layers being being able to go all the way up and come all the way back down again it is still at the limits to sort of computation yeah and then the thing that the systems biology has become much more of a molecular biology thing and it's like well how do the genes affect the way that this bit of the liver function but it doesn't go from the liver up to the human and its health and the population is living in and what it needs to feed on it's only going from the genes to the liver and there's many additional steps that it just computationally they haven't put in yet because we don't know how liver function goes to population function yeah it's not linear it's definitely a different scale it's not only complexity science it's just we're scratching on so many layers that those tools the technologies I mean even with the human genome project they were able to do it and record time computing power but within that there still are our own biome our microbiome the microorganisms that have a whole another sequence within them that that is not it's not discovered in fathom just because we know the human genome and sequencing and things that out what does not mean that we know what's the sub layers the different layers that you just discussed we're running close on time so I've got a couple more questions we could really talk for hours because I love your mind and your work and it's nice to have this dialogue our listeners are really going to love it I want to kind of ask you I don't know if you know I'm a sustainable development goal advocate for the United Nations and the Paris Agreement Paris 2030 agenda and the sustainable development goals the 17 goals with targets and indicators do you believe that that is a good plan a roadmap a structure to get us to December 2030 to to help keep our planet below 1.5 degrees of warming or do you believe that there's some other kind of a global plan out there that that we could work on that would really help us to get into a better future not only environmental problems but human health and many other things we're dealing with at this time I think it's the only plan we have and it's aspirational and it's aspirations are magnificent and we just need more people to get on board with it and make even bigger efforts this time and to see COVID as a wake-up call of some of the things that are going to happen very suddenly and very quickly as I mentioned earlier if we don't do these things because COVID has been a massive economic hit as well as huge human tragedy but lots of biological diversity in the ecosystems it provides particularly say clean water and soil in which to grow crops they're going to make COVID look like an upset at a kid's tea party similarly climate change is sitting beside that and will interact behind all these things so so we desperately need this sustainable development agenda to get us back on track and we need to invest in it financially intellectually and morally I was going to say politically but increasingly politics and morals don't overlap yeah exactly um the the last hardest question I have for you is uh similar to the burning question it's a little bit different and so I want to see if you have a different view of that what does a world that works for everyone look like for you that's a that's an interesting question or a world that works for everyone still has to be this democratic world where you have a bunch of people who don't agree with each other slowing down the rate at which we make stupid decisions but a bunch of innovative and creative people coming up with new solutions to problems but particularly I mean the sort of shiny example from this and in many cases the exceptional shining example among the world's billionaires is Bill Gates who you know it sits behind the technological revolution that gives us our funds and everything but saw that the world's biggest problem is malaria and neglected tropical diseases and puts all of his wealth into solving those because reducing the deaths and misery that diseases cause people throughout the world but particularly Africa Southeast Asia South America will massively empower the economies of those regions and make the world a better place and all the young new Mozart's and Beethoven's and Picasso's will survive because of what he's done the other multi-billionaires pouring their money into the toilet and space exploration are just pissing it away it really is abysmal how the people who capitalized out of covid with everybody having their home deliveries are completely and utterly wasting the money they've egregiously gouged out of people because of it thank you and they would be seen to be stupid and short-sighted because of that yeah would it will be nice that uh i don't even necessarily mind the space exploration or the home deliveries and and those things if they would and invested in a resilient future so that the thing that i like about space is that it's one that's very efficient in order to survive and get back safely or to build or do anything to have energy in space you have to be extremely resilient and efficient of every movement and usage that you have which can really strongly be applied here on on this earth i'm a big fan of Carl Sagan i i interviewed his daughter here on my show recently and sausage Sagan but uh we are all star stuff we're made up of the basic elements of the insides of collapsing stars and and we're part of the year old com yeah yeah exactly and so i i really believe that that you know there there's some there's some wisdom in that the the last big question i have for you is if you could go up to my listeners individually and provide them with one sustainable takeaway that would empower them or help them as startups innovators entrepreneurs or people who are really concerned about how to arrive in the future a little bit more resilient and and uh have a have a good life what would that take away or that word of wisdom that you would could depart to them um that that that kind of maybe make their life better or be be something that they could put in their toolbox uh or on their tool belt to help them get through life a little bit better go to your local farmers market talk to the people who produce the food ask them that yeah what's the way to cook this how would you have what's a really good way to cook this and how did you go how you know how many crops a year do you go and talk to the people who produce your food and then see if they want you to come and help learn about where your food comes from and how to enjoy a healthier diet would make everybody in a better place particularly if they saw how it was produced thank you so much um that's all i have for you today unless you have any questions for me but i really thank you so much for your time my pleasure all right thank you very much